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Nalin Mehta. India and Its Television: Ownership, Democracy, and the Media Business. Emerging Economy Studies, May 2015; vol. 1, 1: pp. 50–63.

With annual revenues of about $17 billion in 2012, India is among the world’s top 15 global media and entertainment markets. While much attention has been focused in recent years on India’s rise as an emerging economy, its great-power potential as the world’s largest democracy and the future trajectory of its growth but the role of India’s burgeoning media industry in this wider story is much less understood. For a country with the world’s largest newspaper market, second largest telecommunications market, third largest television market, and second largest Facebook community, the virtual absence of India from most mainstream global communications studies within academia is strange. In revenue terms, India’s share of the global media sector still remains small but within the top 15 media and entertainment economies, only India has had consistent over-15 percent growth rates for years. Yet, outside of India, within the wider ambit of policy and international relations, few understand the crucial role Indian media play in the ebbs and flows of Indian politics and how central it is to India’s boisterous democracy. This article concentrates on Indian television and its future directions. Combined with the rise of the other device that has grown faster than toilets in India – the mobile phone – television has fundamentally reshaped Indian democracy and emerged as a critical social lever. This article outlines ownership patterns in Indian television, the divergences and commonalities across regional languages and what this means for India’s democracy.

Vaclav Stetka. From Multinationals to Business Tycoons: Media Ownership and Journalistic Autonomy in Central and Eastern Europe. The International Journal of Press/Politics, October 2012; vol. 17, 4: pp. 433–456.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the changing patterns of media ownership in ten new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and discusses the implications of these processes for media freedom and autonomy. Briefly outlining the history of internationalization of CEE media markets, it argues that the presence of Western-based multinational companies on the CEE media markets has been recently diminishing rather than further growing. In addition, a different type of actor has been gaining prominence on the CEE media map, unspotted or largely overlooked in most previous analyses, namely, local business elites acquiring stakes in news media. Combining secondary sources and field interviews with media experts and practitioners, this study explores the various practices of business and political instrumentalization of media by their local owners, often resulting in a constrained editorial independence and increasing intertwinement of the systems of media, politics, and economy in the region.